And no, I didn’t think Stevie and Lisette were dead. Why should they be dead? Why should either be dead? The odds they were alive were greatly in their favor. But who knew if they—assuming Herb ever tracked them down—would find grown-up me attractive, or even likable, much less lovable? Who knew what I would think of grown-up them? I had hopes, of course—I’m not saying I didn’t—that’s why I’d hired Herb, but hopes were…just that. Hopes were just hopes. And as for the girl who talked to inans, it appeared I had next to no hope at all; it appeared that I barely even believed in her existence; if I’d really thought such a woman existed, I would have been more than just a little disappointed that the attractive woman who’d just touched my hand wasn’t her, wouldn’t I? A woman who talked to inans—regardless of how attractive I found her—is someone I would want, at the very least, to be friends with. Someone I’d think I’d want to be best friends with (if adults could still do that). And if I’d believed such a woman existed, and if I’d believed that I had just found her, then when I, in the very next moment, realized she wasn’t who I’d thought she was—i.e. that she wasn’t a woman who talked to inans, i.e. that she was only a woman who’d been talking through the mike of an earpiece—I’d have been disconsolate. Of that I’m certain. It had happened before (earpiece notwithstanding), numerous times throughout my teens and early twenties, back when I did believe such a person existed and I’d think I’d found her only then to discover, moments later, that I hadn’t.
But here I was, just a little disappointed by this attractive woman; far less disappointed by this attractive woman than I was attracted to this attractive woman.
I flipped her lighter shut, gave it back, and asked her name.
She said her name was Denise, and I said I was Belt. She asked what Belt was short for, and I told her, “Nothing,” and she asked what kind of name it was, and, rather than telling her the story of my mother’s uncle Belt and Billie Holiday, all I said was, “No kind, really.”
We dragged at our cigarettes in silence for a while, til Denise said, “There’s something sweet about you, isn’t there? You’re old-school shy. You’re not, like, ‘on the spectrum,’ or ‘suffering from social anxiety.’ You just have no idea how this is all supposed to go, and you’re afraid that if you say or do the wrong thing, you’ll make me uncomfortable. So I’m gonna help you out, if that’s alright with you.”
Maybe it was needy of me—or maybe it was epiphenomenal to whatever quality of mine gave Denise the impression I was shy—but I was flattered to hear her attempt to narrate my inner life. Fon had done the same with far greater acumen—I wasn’t, there on the bench, feeling shy; I was, rather, wondering if I should follow through on what I understood (to my surprisingly mild surprise, and via no means I was able to pin down or name) to be an opportunity to have sex with Denise—but still, I liked it. I liked Denise for doing it. Her version of me was one I could work with.
“Alright,” I said. “Help me.”
“Start by telling me why you really came over here.”
“It’s embarrassing,” I said. “There was something about you that…”
“ ‘Something about me,’ you were saying,” she said.
“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Do you want to drink about it?” she said.
“Drink about it?”
“Yeah. You know, go somewhere with me and drink all about it.”
“It sounds fun,” I said, “but I’m a lightweight, and I’m driving.”
“Well this is what I think about all of that,” she said. “I’m not a lightweight. I say you get in your car and I’ll get in mine, and I’ll follow you to your place, and we’ll drink about it there. You know, really drink it over.”
“Not sure…” I said.
“Or we could reverse that up. You could follow me to my place, and we could drink about it there.”
“What are we supposed to be drinking about, again?”
“I forgot, too,” she said. “And that’s a good sign, and I still think you’re shy, but soon, I have to tell you—and this is important—soon, I’m gonna start thinking you’re a jerk who overheard me fighting with my ex on the phone, thought he might come over here and take a chance at taking advantage while I was vulnerable, but found me less vulnerable than he’d first suspected, less pretty up close than he had from a distance, and now just wants to max out feeling good about being wanted, then go home to his wife.”
“I don’t have a wife.”
“Girlfriend.”
“That either. And also I think you’re prettier up close,” I said. “And I would like to follow you to your place, I think. I hesitate because we’re not in love, and I don’t believe we’ll ever fall in love, and I worry that if we go back to your place and we don’t fall in love, you’ll feel bad.”
“I’ll feel bad.”
“And then I’ll feel bad. I’m not trying to sound selfless. I dislike the idea of making you feel bad.”
“You’re hilarious, Belt,” she said. “Maybe you’re creepy. Maybe I like that. Where’d you park? I’m right there.”
I followed her to her place, a five-bedroom home in Deerbrook Park a couple blocks from the lake. It was actually her parents’ place—the house she’d grown up in (her parents, retired, spent most of the year abroad, traveling, and were, at that time, “somewhere in New Zealand or Australia”). She’d been staying at the house for just a couple weeks and commuting occasionally to the city for work—she did freelance “high-end graphic design” for a number of different advertising firms—since she’d broken things off with her ex-fiancé of nearly six years after catching him cheating, and would move back to Chicago the following month, when the lease on her new apartment started. She told me these things over yeasty beers on the backyard patio, then said that she, if I didn’t mind, would like us to bring our beers inside, upstairs to her bathroom, where—when she was a teen and it was too cold outside, or late enough at night that her parents had already armed the home’s alarm system—she’d gone to smoke Bijous with the overhead fan on. I said of course I didn’t mind, and she grabbed two more beers, and we smoked on the floor of her bathroom with the fan on, our backs against the wall, an empty bottle between us for use as an ashtray. The floor of the bathroom was remarkably clean, the blue tiles smooth and even and cool, their grouting uniformly white and unstained, and I liked to picture her there, smoking as a teen. It seemed like exactly the right thing to do in there. I said so. She kissed me. I enjoyed it—the nothing-taste of her mouth, the slowness of her tongue, the faint, clovey smell that came off her skin, which may have been a perfume, but I think was just the soap she washed her face with, or perhaps a lotion (except for some eyeliner, she wore no makeup, and she didn’t seem the kind of woman who used perfume, if that makes any sense (I think it does)). We kissed for some minutes, my hands in her hair, on her cheek, on her knee, and then we stopped kissing and she said she wanted to know more about me, and I told her I didn’t like to talk about myself, and she said I should tell her just one big thing, allow her one follow-up, and then we could proceed. I liked the sound of proceed. I thought about all the “big” things I could tell her about myself, all but one of which were intimate and therefore, given that we wouldn’t fall in love, inappropriate to mention, so I went with the one that wasn’t so intimate, said I’d written a novel called No Please Don’t, and her follow-up was, “Where’s the best place for me to buy a copy?” and I told her I’d give her one, and she took me to bed. Her bed was a queen and it smelled like her face. We stayed there awhile. We had sex three times, and I think that I did okay the second time, and I’m sure I did the third.